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By Sam Tanenhaus October 11, 2007 12:01 pmOctober 11, 2007 12:01 pm

It’s marathon season in New York, and I’m delighted to announce that a panel of limber readers (see their bios in the right column) have agreed to join me in going the distance with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” all 1200-plus pages in the new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which we’ll be reading and discussing during the next four weeks.

Why “War and Peace”? Well, it’s one of the greatest novels ever written — the very greatest, some would say. It is, moreover, almost eerie in its timeliness, with its sweeping detailed narrative of military invasion and occupation (by France of Russia in 1812) set against political and social intrigue in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as experienced by aristocratic families, some of them in decline.

“War and Peace” is not just massive. It is sturdily and delicately structured. The novel divides into four volumes (there is also an epilogue). We’ll cover one volume each week — though the panelists will be encouraged to range freely over the whole of the book, its opulent mix of incidents and characters (who include Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and also to tackle Tolstoy’s profound meditations on history, philosophy, religion and human nature.

As moderator, I’ll begin each week with a brief summary of what we’ve read and then pose a small cluster of questions — sometimes directed to all four panelists, now and then to one in particular, since each brings to the discussion particular expertise that will unlock new portals into Tolstoy’s vast and intricate universe.
So, to begin. Volume 1 opens in a St. Petersburg drawing room in 1805. The elite have gathered, and the talk is of Napoleon — demigod or demiurge? — and his frighteningly efficient military campaign. His huge army is trampling all of Europe underfoot, nation after nation; the guests know the troops are headed, ultimately, to Russia. Some of the principal characters appear, above all two close friends, the naïve and hapless Pierre Bezhukov and the tormented Prince Andrei Bolkonsky — their contrasting lives and experiences will form the center of the events as they unfold over the narrative to come.

Then the action shifts to Russia’s other great city, Moscow, and the household of the Rostovs, with their attractive children — the fetching Natasha and her siblings. This is our entry into the world of Russian domesticity — privileged and ultra-civilized (everyone speaks French instead of Russian) yet touched with primitive earthiness.

Next Tolstoy visits the Austrian front, where the Russian troops have been sent — Prince Andrei among them — to reinforce the outnumbered and disorganized Austrian army. A series of skirmishes, described with cinematic exactitude, climax in the battle of Austerlitz, one of Napoleon’s greatest victories.

My first question comes from the essay Tolstoy wrote in defense of “War and Peace” — yes, the book met with criticism upon its publication in 1869. Readers didn’t know what to make of it. It read in some places like a history text or battlefield manual, in others like The Odyssey or The Aeneid. Tolstoy explains: “‘War and Peace’ is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle.” He then differentiates between the work of the historian and that of the artist and says historical accounts require heroes while for the artist “there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be people.”

My first questions to the group: (1) Isn’t “War and Peace” in fact all these things — a novel, a poem, and a historical chronicle? Has Tolstoy really separated so neatly the functions of the artist from those of the historian? Does his invented world really seem devoid of heroes?

(2) One of the overarching themes in the novel — it amounts to a theory of history — is that human design is continually frustrated by events, which are too huge, complex and random for us to make sense of, let alone control. But don’t the events in Volume 1 — Pierre’s sudden inheritance and his horrific marriage, Napoleon’s precision-tuned military victories, and many more — unfold with a kind of inevitability, which in turn implies there is some deeply rational order to the universe?

I read this novel, cover to cover, the summer before last and have never been sure that Tolstoy knew entirely what his novel actually was. Certainly by the term “hero”, none of the characters is that, they’re not epochal figures from classical literature, Shakespearean tragedy, though by today’s standard notion of the hero, which merely means the protagonists and stars, the book has those aplenty. Which leads me to your second question about the novel’s theory of history and your suggestion of a kind of paradox at its heart. Firstly, Tolstoy, if you go by the later sermons and lessons on history in the novel, says that history is the story of designs too large and complex to be understood by people, with something of a hint of intelligent design; then he suggests that all is chance and chaos. Were Napoleon’s victories precision-tuned? I thought Tolstoy presented them as grotesque and haphazard, spent hundreds of pages, it seemed, suggesting that Napoleon the great man was merely a delusion of historians, a matter of being at the right time, right place, which is where Tolstoy’s thinking again grades via some sort of zeitgeisty voodoo back into a Hegelian notion of history as a godlike force acting outside of human activity. This sort of thing nearly made my head explode, until I realized that while his notions, in terms of history as a force, and his certainty that figures don’t matter, is really quite debatable, that his theory of simultaneous accident and design is perfectly workable in terms of the novel War And Peace–all the explanations certainly give us some real sense of the way Tolstoy conceives human drama in this particular book; they also mar it 1, by continually telling us over and over what he had already said and dramatized quite beautifullay and, 2, mistaking his thoughts for genuine historical philosophy instead of literary design, a notion I know would have driven him crazy. But it’s the only thing that can possibly be the rationality for his repetitiveness on the issues, because at some sense he knows he hasn’t really explained life, and keeps desperately trying to pin it down.

I’m delighted to see this site, and can’t wait for it to get going. I’ve read the first 300 or so pages and I’m struck again and again by how un-novelistic — extra-novelistic? — the book is.

The scenes in Moscow society & then at Bald Hills seem to me absolutely perfect, full of funny and sharp human detail, moving, etc. But then the war scenes come along and stretch out for what feels like an eternity. What I keep thinking of, as I read the war parts, is those old Chinese tapestry prints you see sometimes, in which hundreds of tiny soldiers are arrayed all over the place, indistinct, seen from way above. The war feels above all impersonal, which seems so strange after the deeply personal scenes back home. I’m eager for a new & more involved way of reading these battle scenes…

I have always enjoyed letting Prescott’s writings on the conquerors of Mexico and Peru slosh around with Tolstoi’s ideas on Napolean.
That thought reminds me of Prescott’s similar views in many of his other histories and Tolstoi’s ranging variety of other views.

His repetitiveness doesn’t have to be because he knows he hasn’t really explained life. Part of what he was trying to do was to make the subject of history more “scientific.” A typical scientific paper is quite repetitive; it has a structure like the following: introduction (say what you’re going to do), main body (say what you did in detail), conclusion (summarize what you did). So his repetitiveness might be a consequence of this.

Actually, I think he does a pretty good job of pinning down life. For example, I would say that he was successful in atomizing people’s thoughts and feelings and then showing how these affect their decisions. At one point in the story, Bolkonsky retires to work on his estate, being disillusioned with participating in national affairs. Then he changes his mind. What caused the change? It has something to do with his by chance being moved at seeing a beautiful girl (Natasha) admiring the moonlight. Another incident later in the story: Natasha is a spirited but sensible girl, so why does she respond to the advances of Kuragin at the performance? Well, part of the reason is that particular night, she was feeling especially light hearted and elated, so she was more disposed to him.

These incidents also illustrate that events in the universe aren’t entirely chaotic but they aren’t entirely rational (in the sense of being logical), either. Yes, there is a reason why Bolkonsky gets involved in national affairs again, but it has to do with him meeting and falling in love with Natasha. Yes, there is a reason why Natasha falls in love with Kuragin. But it arguably has more to do with him catching her at a bad time than it has to do with her character.

Another thing. The reason that Bolkonsky gets involved in national affairs again is kind of silly. It seems that Bolkonsky recognizes this because he immediately invents more rational reasons for his decision. So we see that while human life isn’t entirely rational, perhaps people want it to be and will invent logical reasons why things happen. People such as Bolkonsky and, maybe, historians?

My thoughts about his not pinning down the meaning of life did not refer to the novelistic drama of his characters, why they do or don’t do what they do, but to the parts, which constitute probably almost three hundred pages or more, where Tolstoy steps outside the story to explain disputes between historians, notions of what history is and is not and the exact mechanics of how life works or does not work. Maybe this is scientific, but it’s also quite bewildering because it seemed to this reader so conflicted as to become almost meaningless except in terms of understanding the author’s manner of structuring the work at hand.

There is an inherent conflict between art, a narrative which necessitates a logical flow and order, and life, which is, in Tolstoy’s view, unpredictable, disorderly, and contingent. This conundrum was addressed by Prof. Gary Morson in his 1996 book, Narrative and Freedom:

“Structure banishes contingency because each incident must have a purpose, must contribute to the overall plot and pattern, or it would not have been included in the first place.”

How, then, did Tolstoy manage to write War and Peace, to overcome these constraints imposed by the novel? The answer is this: Tolstoy included a number of characters and plot strands that went undeveloped, suggesting a universe of many possibilities, in which not all that happens is inevitable.

In his question above, Tanenhaus reads inevitability into certain events in the novel (Pierre’s inheritance, Napoleon’s victories), but Morson would argue that it didn’t have to happen; that many other things might just as well have occurred.

Morson explains: “In War and Peace…[there are] numerous events and characters that may have either great consequence or no consequence at all. In Tolstoy’s book, both possibilities are always present, as they are in life.”

He continues: “Readers of novels are expected to seek significance. When at the beginning of Great Expectations, Pip gives a pie to a convict, the reader knows that this event will mean something or it would not have been narrated. The fact that the work is known to be an artifact, an aesthetic structure planned in advance, guarantees significance. From Tolstoy’s perspective, such advance assurance is precisely why artifacts are artificial and why we sense a radical difference between art and life. In W&P and Anna Karenina, there are numerous events that occupy a great deal of space but lead nowhere…time in Tolstoy’s works therefore feels unplanned and contingent, just as life is contingent.”

In one example, Morson cites Prince Andrei’s seemingly important interaction with Prince Adam Czartoryski (p. 310), a character whose introduction (“Such men as he who decide the fate of nations”) seems to portend later plot significance. Instead, Czartoryski simply fades into the background with little fanfare.

Interestingly enough, Dostoevsky, faced the same problem of writing his views on chance, choice and complexity into an orderly novel. His solution? To write without having a pre-planned outline of his novel, without knowing what would come next.

How could he do this? Surely, even without a plan, one would go back after completing a novel, tying up loose ends. Not so, with the benefit of serial publication. Having his book published in parts allowed Dostoevsky to write a book with a number of seemingly unnecessary, undeveloped strands, contingencies, and untapped possibilities.

Morson calls this technique “Sideshadowing.” It is a reference to the commonly known technique of foreshadowing, in which something that happens in the future sends an omen backwards to the present, creating loose ends to be tied up. Sideshadowing is the opposite: creating a present that is unaffected by the unfated future, one with ends that will never be tied.

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky shared a number of philosophical views, among them, a deep-seated belief in the complexity and unpredictability of life, in free will, and a fateless, beautiful, disorderly world. It is a testament to their ability as novelists that they were able to take a form that inherently craves order, patterns, and logic, and out of that, craft a world in which realistic, disorderly, and unplanned things could occur, just as they do in life.

I finished the Briggs’ version just a few weeks ago, and Joseph Aisenberg perfectly captures a few of my own qualms about the novel.

While I think it’s a great and powerful novel in so very many ways, Tolstoy’s theory of history is neither profound nor interesting. For what seem like hundreds of pages, he argues with one dead and forgotten historian after the next that Napoleon wasn’t a genius, that historians cannot figure out how wars proceed because, 1, it follows a divine plan that has nothing to do with human design, and 2, so much of war is simply a matter of chance, decided on the ground, in the thick of battle, among soldiers who may or may not be following orders — and who may well be just trying to save their own skin. I think if there’s a relevance to it, it’s that it kind of echoes what today we call, after Robert McNamara, the “fog of war.”

As a practical theory of warfare, this is almost useless; Tolstoy’s message over and over just seems cranky and reactionary, as if his whole philosophy boils down to “Were ya there, Charlie?” As art, however, it is something else — because the entire novel is about what we cannot possibly know. Everyone in the book wants some kind of answer to the biggest of questions: what is the meaning of life. Like war itself, it’s an answer beyond human reach; only God knows it, although we may glean glimpses of it, here and there; Andrei only understands life as it is seeping out of his body and Pierre understands it by seeing courage under battle, and by way of his marital bliss with Natasha. No one, though, ever reaches a final answer, just as none of us ever will.

I tend to side with those who prefer the Peace side of the novel to the War side; the war scenes actually just bored me, which I know is some kind of literary sin because they are supposed to be so exciting. I recognize the technical skill behind them, yes, but they do not grip me.

What I love about Tolstoy is his very great sense of character, and that’s what makes this novel (after a couple of hundred pages of warming up) such a page-turner: Natasha and Helene and Marya and Rostov and Andrei and Pierre and so many others. He dives deep into their lives and we dive with him.

I’m immensely grateful for this discussion and look forward to hearing more from all involved.

Answering the last post: I am so glad that this is possible for English speakers to feel that the fictional characters in there are more alive than your neghbors. For me, to know Natasha, Andrey, Anna (Karenina)and Jesus (Christ) is the same experience: namely, acquaitance with written, but nevertheless real people that can effect your life.

I, too, am thrilled with this idea. It’s been at least 10 years since I last read W&P, but I’ve been a fan of Pevear and Volokhonsky, and I’m really looking forward to jumping in once the new translation is available.

What a wonderful coincidence! Two weeks ago I finally got tired of never having read W&P and went out and bought it–in the Briggs translation, mostly b/c the first paragraph sounded better than the other ones on the shelf and it was a nicely bound paperback that would stay open easily for bedtime reading.
And I’ve been totally enthralled ever since, regaling my friends with how amazing Tolstoy is and wondering, Leo, where have you been all my life?
I’ve had a long weekend this weekend and have clocked at least 300 pages and have to wrench myself away to get anything else done.
The last time this happened with a book was when I finally clicked with Moby Dick 6 years agao adn read it in a Melville-hallucinated haze in about 2 weeks.
hooray !

Like Catherine, I also got tired of not having read W&P and got an old translation out of the library last week. Have gotten into Book 2 but must rush out and buy this new translation — it sounds excellent, especially having the French be French…

Re. the difficulty of classifying W&P as a novel, I wonder if there was any influence from Melville’s Moby Dick published 20 years before, another sort of post-modern combination of literary genres.

We have a W&P story in my family. My grandfather’s grandfather, Clarkson Butterworth, wrote a history of his family in 1880. They were a Quaker family from England, who had settled in Virginia, then moved to Ohio in 1812 to leave slavery behind. The family history includes a story about an ancestor in Virginia whose wife owned slaves, and freed them on her deathbed.
Clarkson Butterworth was, like Tolstoy, born in 1828. The Family managed a stop on the Underground Railroad (I’ve seen the family house where a cupboard in the basement covered a hole used to hide the slaves.), but they were also pacifists and war resisters, and in 1864 the authorities took some of their sheep to pay for their refusal to join the militia.
Clarkson had to stop farming because of a skin condition, and then started researching and writing his local histories. My grandfather used to describe visiting him, and watching him plow a furrow up and back the long field behind the house, then stop to let the mules rest in the shade while he smoothed out the dirt and did geometry proofs with a stick.
The reference Tolstoy is that in his final years Clarkson started reading War and Peace. He was determined to finish it before he died, and apparently he just barely made it. He died in 2/27/1916, and of course people said if he had picked a shorter book he might have died in ’15. I can only imagine what connections he felt: a family with thousands of acres in Ohio, once slave owners, living through a devastating war. And both Tolstoy and Clarkson were known for their spirituality, although Clarkson seems to have missed the wine, women, cards, song and military service phase that Tolstoy went through. Clarkson’s writing undoubtedly suffered from this lack. He did have a good beard, though!
I’ve always been fascinated by the way ideas used to travel around the world. How did Tolstoy hear about Thoreau? Ghandi about both of them? I travelled with a labor organizer in Bolivia, and heard that the first labor strike by the Amayra miners was only a couple of years after the Ludlow miners went on strike in the US. It’s less of a mystery now with the internet, but people still have to be ready to hear the ideas.
Anyway, just a story about the impact of the book on one person in the US. I don’t know when W&P was first translated into English. It’s impossible for us to read a “classic” the same way contemporaries did when it was first released.

I studied Tolstoy’s War and Peace at Brandeis University in the early 1960s with Philip Rahv, the great critic, editor and founder of the Partisan Review. He began our study by spending several classes describing Russian life and society of the 19th Century — the powerful influence on the Russian elite of French culture. He then talked about Tolstoy’s view of the enduring power of Russia — its land and peasantry. Before Rahfv began his memorable examination of the extraordinary book itself, I remember him saying that Tolstoy and God were like two bears in a cave.

The crux of the W & P brilliance is the complexity of the characters and Tolstoy’s attempt to prove that the world is chaotic. Order cannot be given to something so complex and irrational. He was not attempting to be a historian at all, and was in fact criticized widely by his peers like Turgenev and Flaubert, as well as military specialists who claimed the novel is inaccurate and the historical details are falsified.

All of course acknowledged Tolstoy’s gift but even Tolstoy himself despised history and called it “nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles” he wanted to write a “historical” novel only to highlight the real from the believed. He argued that history is often looked at as a science, which is a vain attempt to give meaning to the universe. He believed that history is presented only as political and economical and all spiritual elements are forgotten – Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” is a must read for anyone truly interested in Tolstoy’s War & Peace.
Berlin writes…”Tolstoy treats facts cavalierly when it suits him, because he is above all obsessed with his thesis – the contrast between the universal and all important but delusive experience of free will, the feeling of responsibility, the values of private life…”

Tolstoy saw those who attempted to give meaning and place their own mark on events as vain and absurd – man suffers much because he seeks too much. Delusions of grandeur are for the feeble who see the world as a theory – a comprehensible, tangible ideal. If man concentrated on himself, rather than trying to save the world, we would be in a much better place. Tolstoy saw truth in common people, not in generals or historians, he basked in the wisdom of pure thought – many in his time looked at the common peasant for answers and spiritual guidance as well (i.e. Rasputin)

War & Peace is not about history at all – yes if you see the world in black & white – simply put W & P is a rebuttal to determinism – There are no laws in nature.

I have read W&P 5 times (I think), and I’m thrilled to learn that Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated it. I’ve enjoyed their Dostoyevsky translations very much. For W&P, I’ve read the Maude translation 3(?) times with great enjoyment. I’m not sure how the new work will handle the French, but the Maudes left in the French passages and then immediately included an English translation in brackets — perfect for me.

I have to say, I have always liked the clunky old Constance Garnett translations of the Russians, including W&P. I think the “Russian-ness” of the works comes through, and the Victorian English works for the books set in the 19th Century. It could just mean that the works are good enough to survive most any kind of treatment.

As to the form of W&P, I’m with Bill Keller — it’s a novel. Maybe a novel with a lot of authorial commentary on generalship and theories of history, but the events in the lives of the characters told with narrative techniques make up the heart of the book.

“War and Peace” is always my response to the question “What is your favorite work of literature?” In fact Tolstoy, the visionary, the humanist, the monumental wordsmith means everything to every reader. Whether you search for solid characterization, or an interesting storyline, or, in this case, a very special view of how history can be a force of human destiny, Tolstoy carries all the tools.

Thank you for your interest in my favorite author. You have brought a giant of literature to our readership. (I have been reading articles in The Times since the 60s.)

The Pevear tranlsations of Dostoevsky are excellent, so I know this transalation of “War and Peace” will be a good one.

I think a most fitting tribute was given by the author. Whether fact or not, after he finished writing the history, he cried. Tolstoy knew he would never experience his characters and their passions again. TW

One thought about whether it’s a novel or not; yes, of course, but it’s such a strange creature. Usually, when we think of great novels, we think (among other things) of a great, stirring ending that leaves the book resonating in your head. Some people will no doubt make that claim for W&P, but I personally think that concluding sermon is so dull and repetitious that it almost capsizes a novel that only grows in interest most of the way through. I wish he had not saved the worst for last.

Here’s another question: is this a work of art or is it a novel of ideas? A work of art that gets possessed by a novel of ideas?

What Vladimir Nabokov said of Anna Karenina is doubly true of its predecessor:

“Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist — it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper — far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical. that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna’s white neck. But the thing cannot be done: Tolstoy is homogenous, is one, and the struggle which, especially in the later years, went on between the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds, and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral — the struggle was still confined within the same man.”

I too have read W&P at least five times, usually in the summer and generally out of frustration with the state of literature. (Forgive me, oh novelists of the day.) Tolstoy’s genius (however overwrought) by turns reveals the human dilemma and then confuses our vision, opening vistas of recognition, then slamming us with the harsh reality of life’s unknowability. As some have already observed, his endeavor seems to be about abandoning order, as in war, while tracing out a few individual histories, as in the writing of any story with a plot line. As Joseph Aisenberg noted above, “simultaneous accident and design.” The philosophical curliques throughout, and especially at the end, prevent me from thinking of it as poetry.

For me his hero is an Everywo/man, no hero at all, just folks daily being humbled by life, illness, the struggle to make meaning, the encounter with meaninglessness, and death. And that’s what makes it great literature.

I am awed as Tolstoy captures characters stunningly, by gesture, word, omission, thought-line, often thoroughly and concisely at once.
The difference between his incisive accuracy of portrait in the comedy-of-manners portions of the book and his groaning elaboration of war sometimes seems to suggest each was written by only one half of his brain, as if his brain’s hemispheres are what’s battling like bears in a cave.

Finally, a note on John Chen’s suggestion the Bolkonsky was able to seduce Natashya because he caught her at a bad time: yes, the bad time being her young and foolish years. The book could have been titled “Innocence and Experience,” to refer to the sobering maturation of its central characters and, for a while, the Russian nation. Meanwhile the world in the large continues through war and peace, suffering and indulgence, stupidity and evanescent illumination. Where are we now, for instance? Some in the ballroom, others on the battleground, as usual. If everyone could read War and Peace and learn its lessons, we might come to some general agreements (and perhaps settle disputes via art); the tragic fact is that war (and the other plagues) prevent universal literacy, among other things, and we slog on through the cold muck in our leaky boots.

It’s a slow afternoon here in Sumatra, Natasha, and Pierre of course is Bezukhov from War and Peace, the character in all my reading with whom I most identified. A Freemason seemingly stolid and sometimes reckless, who is nevertheless capable of decisive action and displays of willpower when circumstances demanded it. A poor horseman and even less competent duellist who finally realizes that he loves a flibbertygibbet who beds the worst scoundrel in Moscow.

Panel of W&P bloggers:
Get on it. This is a great idea but you need to post every day. Are you already out of ideas? Sheesh. Here are a few:
-The book is now available at bookstores. How’s it doing?
-Chapter-or-two-a-day discussion.
-Links to period art, music. (Links are commonly used in blogs.)
-How the book influenced other writers and artists.
-A Ruskie Cafe in NY (and elsewhere) that would be a great place to read the book.
-Favorite quotes from the book.
-Anna K. VS W&P.
-There are about 600 You Tube video that people would get a kick out of.
Do I have to push your fingers on the keys? Do you really want a short blog for such a long book? What would Tolstoy do?

I have recently had the extraordinary pleasure of re-reading “War and Peace” for the third time, and I must say that the experience was transcendent: not just a re-immersion in the richness of character and the dramas of these unforgettable “people;” but a deeper appreciation of the evolution of their lives and Toystoy’s view of history. In particular, the spiritual growth of Pierre and Natasha in the context of their personal histories — in contrast to the flaying pathos of Napoleon undone by historical forces — is deeply moving.

I am in a re-reading mode now, and I am infinitely grateful for the experiences. Still, among all the great writers, Tolstoy stands alone. Wow!

What an awesome idea! I’m going to go out and buy this new translation today. I last read W & P the summer after my freshman yera in college, and it has never left me. I still remember sitting up late at night when I was at Smith, arguing with a friend of mine about who was more appealing, Prince Andrew or Pierre (I was a Pierre gal myself).

Chandler and McDonald hand private investigators’ liscenses to Marlow and Archer that allow them to peer through keyholes into all of American society. Their cases take them into the homes of Hollywood, the idle rich and America’s business, working and poor classes.

Just as Tolstoy, by granting Pierre and Andrei great wealth and privilage, allows them to move freely among all of early 19th century Russian society.

His depiction of Napoleon’s assualt on Moscow is as good as any historic rendering of war ever written. Just as Joyce’s description of a boxing match in the middle of Ulysses is as good as any of that of our best boxing writers.

Tolstoy’s almost ‘real time’ plotting intensifies and exaggerates character tendencies and motivations. We meet our characters in the seemingly frivilous, yet often deadly drawing rooms of Russian high society, then follow them to a battlefield under whining French bullets or facing a calvery charge. We meet their father’s, mothers, sisters, brothers, relatives and lovers all under the dark cloud of war. Without war we are left with a French novel of manners.

He deftly illuminates the often tragic misjudgements and failures of those who would intellectualize and opportunize war in the promotion of ideological, political or personal agendas.

He just as adroitly illuminates the board game mating rituals of Russia’s
upper class and sharply contrasts them with idealized almost ecstatic love.

Certainly, beginning with his bold title and it’s ambitious scope, Tolstoy
meant to blur the distinction between the novel and historical chronicle
and certainly his book had it’s heroes [ask the girls].